


Soothing the Pain

by kaeorin



Series: Loki's Lullabies [69]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Avenger Loki (Marvel), Avenger Reader (Marvel), Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Innuendo, Massage, Pre-Relationship, Reader-Insert, Scars, Touching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:40:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24516274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin
Summary: When an old line-of-duty injury flares up, you find comfort from a surprising source.
Relationships: Loki (Marvel)/Reader
Series: Loki's Lullabies [69]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240
Comments: 10
Kudos: 239





	Soothing the Pain

Being an Avenger had its perks. Saving the world was great. Obviously. Being stopped by people on the streets was...a lot, but it was mostly great. Living in the Tower with nearly instantaneous access to just about anything your heart could desire was incredibly convenient, and you loved that the rest of the team was here too. There was more than enough space here for all of you to come together and enjoy each other’s company, to work and train and eat together, but also quiet places for you to retreat to when you weren’t overly interested in company. And when you did pull back like that and hide yourself away, everyone understood. They didn’t try to guilt or pressure you into socializing because they all fucking got it.

But there were also drawbacks. Like, when you were a kid, daydreaming about saving the world, you hadn’t considered the amount of paperwork you’d have to do. And training with Captain America and the Black Widow was long, arduous, and, quite frankly, painful, even if the results were often worth it. The worst of it, though, was the havoc that it wreaked on your body. There was no super-soldier serum in your blood. You had not been trained as a warrior from the moment you learned to walk. Though the medical facilities in the Tower were beyond state-of-the-art and Tony often worked with the doctors to keep improving their technology, half a lifetime of getting shot at and stabbed and blown up left its marks.

Your primary complaint was your shoulder. On one of your very first missions with the team, a Hydra agent had nearly blown your arm off. It damaged the ball-and-socket joint in your shoulder, and despite the doctors’ best work, things hadn’t healed completely right. Sometimes, when you overexerted yourself, or underexerted yourself, or if it was going to rain, or if the planets aligned just right, it ached something fierce. Your pride wouldn’t let you complain about it. The other members of the team, each of them had it way worse, and they never breathed a word of it.

It may not have been the wisest decision to set up shop at the kitchen table and try to get through all your paperwork there, instead of in an office with some kind of adjustable chair with ergonomic capabilities or something, but it was easier to focus. You could toss your phone onto the counter, a solid distance away from you, and force yourself to just get this stuff done. When someone wandered in, you could take a short little mental break and chat with them for a while, but they never hung around long enough to completely drag you off-task. It worked well for you, even if some combination of awkward positioning, grey skies, and Mercury being in retrograde or something was making your shoulder hurt.

It was getting late. Activity in the Tower was grinding to a halt. You had to stop working a little more often so you could rub your eyes to try to clear some of the blurriness, and damn if your shoulder wasn’t on fire. You put your pen down with a groan and rolled your neck, trying in vain to find any kind of relief.

Maybe, if you weren’t distracted by your pain, you might have been more aware of Loki’s arrival. The man was entirely too stealthy. It was a little hard to blame him, of course, living here with people who wanted him dead, but you hated how silently he moved, how often he popped up when you least expected it. Like now.

“Having trouble?”

You flinched, of course. You didn’t have to look up to know the kind of expression he’d be wearing: amused, sly. He knew what he did to you, and it amused him. You might have been a little more irritated with him over it if he didn’t look so damn _good_ when he was gloating. You huffed out an indignant sigh and dropped your hands to the table again.

“Jesus, Loki. I’m going to get you a collar with a bell on it or something.” This was hardly the first time he’d startled you like that, but there was just something about the quietness of the Tower around you that stood out. But you weren’t uncomfortable. Loki wasn’t a threat. He wasn’t really a threat to anyone in the Tower, but especially not to you. Maybe it was presumptuous of you, but you felt...almost a kind of kinship with him. You had similar sense of humor, and often, when the two of you were in the same room with all the others, you’d meet each other’s eyes as the rest of the team carried on.

“A collar.” He kept his voice low as he stepped further into the kitchen. Before long, he was leaning against the counter, facing you. When you looked up at him, his smile grew a little wider and he winked. “I’m intrigued.”

Maybe your laugh sounded just a little bit unsteady. He was gorgeous. _Obviously_ he was gorgeous. Even before you really got to know him, it had always perplexed you, how people made such a fuss over Thor but completely overlooked Loki. It seemed like he always tried to give off an air of smug self-awareness, but once you started talking to him, you realized that he wasn’t quite as confident as he tried to make people believe. It made sense, of course: when you were in a position like Loki’s, you had to look self-assured or people would tear you down.

Maybe that was something else that drew you to him. You wanted to protect him. That was _definitely_ presumptuous, and arrogant besides, thinking that someone like him could need someone like _you_ to protect him from anything. You kept those thoughts tamped down very tightly, locked away inside a box inside another box inside another box and shoved off to one side of your mind, just in case Asgardians could read minds.

You rolled your neck again and tried not to grimace. A storm had to be coming or something. It hadn’t been this bad in a long time.

Dimly, you heard Loki push himself away from the counter, but you couldn’t quite track his movement across the kitchen until cool hands came to rest against your shoulders. You didn’t flinch away from him, but you did sort of...freeze beneath his touch. 

“You are hurt?”

Yes. No. Which answer would make him keep touching you? No, stop. You shook your head, both to answer him and to try to clear it, and gave a self-deprecating laugh. “No, I’m fine. It’s just...old battle wounds.”

“May I?” He squeezed your shoulders gently, just once, and just with his fingers, but then let his hands go still against you again. Warmth flooded through you. He was a prince. He was a god. And his hands were already on you, so whatever it was that he was planning, he could easily just go ahead and do it whether or not you wanted him to. But he was waiting for your permission. You wanted to tell him not to worry about it. You wanted to laugh again and brush him off and force yourself not to focus on the pain. 

But you nodded.

He started slowly, probing gently at your tendons and muscles with his fingers like he needed to get a sense of you first. It felt nice. You weren’t usually one for massages. In fact, you normally hated them. Even when you were paying someone to do it, you felt weird letting someone else touch you. It was weird knowing that they were seeking out your tender spots so that they could ease them away. Most of the time, it made you uncomfortable, and then you got so caught up in thinking about how dumb you were for not being able to relax during what was supposed to be an incredibly relaxing process that you felt even worse when they were done.

This was different, though. He’d asked. He’d volunteered. And in the field, on missions, it was so easy to trust that he’d be where you needed him to be and that he’d help you when you needed it that you kind of couldn’t help but relax into his touch here in the kitchen. A lot of the others, they still made jokes (that weren’t completely jokes) about not trusting him, or about wanting backup when they worked or spoke with him, but that wasn’t true for you. So you sat there quietly, almost peacefully, even as he sought out and soothed the knots in your muscles. When he focused his attention on your bad shoulder and squeezed just a little too hard, he backed off as soon as he felt you wince. You even heard him murmur an apology. 

An _apology_. 

From the man the team largely dismissed.

In terms of anatomy, you knew that some of the pain you felt was just in your head. It was hard to shake off the memory of your arm just...exploding, after all, and the pain of that did sort of linger. But there was also a deep ache in the bones sometimes, one that you couldn’t soothe away with all of the massages in the world. Given the choice between having a body that worked perfectly and being an Avenger, of course you’d choose the latter every single time, but this damn shoulder was a pain in the ass.

After a while, when he’d soothed away almost all of the tension in your muscles, Loki touched the collar of your shirt. Somehow you knew without looking that his fingers were sort of hovering there. “I— Could I— I’d like to try something. Do you mind?”

He sounded uncertain. You tried not to smile at the uncharacteristic hesitance in his voice, It was nice to have that reminder, every once in a while, that he really wasn’t as aloof as he pretended to be. “Go ahead,” you said softly. “Thank you.”

He hummed in response, and then you felt his cool fingers slip through the collar of your shirt. He zeroed in on your shoulder, of course. You weren’t entirely comfortable with the fact that he’d surely feel all the scar tissue, but you’d already given him permission, after all, so you just bit your lower lip. He drew his fingers along some of the worst scars for just a moment, like he was trying to map them out in his mind. Thankfully, he moved on from that pretty quickly, even before you had to try to figure out how to ask him to stop. 

He closed his fingers around your shoulder and squeezed it gently. His skin felt nice. You typically used heat when it was giving you trouble, but Loki was making you rethink things. His hand was cold—you were pretty sure it was colder than normal, even—and the chill crept through your skin and into your bones. It didn’t make sense, but it dulled the ache. A lot.

“Oh...” The word came out almost like a moan, but you couldn’t quite find it in you to care. You tipped your head forward and focused on the blessed _lack_ of pain. “Oh my _god_ , Loki...”

You heard him chuckle behind you, and braced yourself for some kind of filthy joke, but lord if you weren’t willing to endure hours of furious blushing if it meant he’d keep doing whatever he was doing right now. Sure enough, he rested his chin on your other shoulder and breathed long and slow against your neck. The shiver that ran through you had nothing to do with temperature.

“I like the way you say my name.” His voice was dark, but you could _hear_ the smirk that surely curled his lips.


End file.
